Move Beyond Windows Is Imminent for Enterprise

An IT author and assistant professor at the University of New England recently reinforced the idea that the day approaches when businesses will have a choice of operating systems in the enterprise. ITBusiness.ca reports that Joe Habraken told attendees at the IT360 event in Canada this week that Apple, Linux, virtualization and Web-based apps will define the next generation OS.

Apple may be the vendor to beat in the coming years, according to Habraken. The company's large presence in the education space has made it the provider of choice among today's students -- many of whom bought Macs after they'd been introduced to Apple via the iPod. As those students move into the workplace, he says, they will "control the purse strings" and more than likely will insist on Macs in the enterprise -- especially if the "emphasis on multimedia applications" continues to grow.

Virtualization will make the move even easier because users will be able to run multiple operating systems from a single machine. Thus, the story says, they can use Windows for particular tasks when necessary. The increasing popularity of Web-based applications and the growing mobile workforce are also factors that will play -- and are already playing -- key parts in the move to alternative operating systems.

I am very uncomfortable with the dominance of Windows and would be pleased if your predictions of its impending demise are accurate.Unfortunately, quite a few of the enterprise clients I work with have indicated concern about the cost and technical problems of moving to an environment in which Windows is either non-existent or much less dominant.Can you please comment? Reply

May 9, 2007 12:35 PMBob Tapscott
says:

I suspect that Microsoft's dominance of the industry is seriously in peril for two reasons. 1) The Wintel alliance of ever fatter software running on ever faster chips has run its course. People simply do not understand why Word 2007, to perform basic word processing functionality, cannot be memory resident and run at lightning fast speed. Other options will soon appear that will. 2) More and more applications will become Web 2.0 enabled. As browser based apps they will minimize the relevance of what operating system runs underneath. Yes, the workstation of the future will have a keyboard and an LCD, but they will connect to your PDA and the net. Reply

May 10, 2007 5:13 AMThe Management Consultant
says:

I see a continuing battle of the dynamics in the industry for market share for the desktop os with Linux,solaris,Mac and Ms.The likely result is in the short term a higher frequency in the development cycle of these OS and market dominence only likely in niche markets. OS consolidation and telcos may also be a space to watch. Reply

May 10, 2007 12:40 PMRicky Schultz
says:

essentially, I can see the value in a "narrowed" focus OS. Why do you need multimedia capacity in a machine that is doing accounting, or focused on word processing. It is nice to have a swiss army knife of an OS.... but as one of the previous posts so clearly pointed toward "memory resident" software as a goal. In some cases you need all the bells and whistles, but a nice tight OS code that is focused on I/O operations, data processing and information retrieval in a gui/ optional command line environment would be so different, and hopefully the software so unaccessable by the general public, that this would create a level of security in and of itself. Narrow market OS is the future. Reply

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